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Smarter models aren't going to somehow magically understand what is important to you. If you took a random smart person you'd never met and asked them to summarize your inbox without any further instructions they would do a terrible job too.

You'd be surprised at how effective current-gen LLMs are at summarizing text when you explain how to do it in a thoughtful system prompt.

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I’m less concerned with understanding what’s important to me than I am the number of errors they make. Better prompts don’t fix the underlying issue here.

Indeed.

With humans, every so often I find myself in a conversation where the other party has a wildly incorrect understanding of what I've said, and it can be impossible to get them out of that zone. Rare, but it happens. With LLMs, much as I like them for breadth of knowledge, it happens most days.

That said, with LLMs I can reset the conversation at any point, backtracking to when they were not misunderstanding me — but even that trick doesn't always work, so the net result is the LLM is still worse at understanding me than real humans are.

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